Jo put the bit of cloth into a pocket and carefully tucked it down into a safe corner; then he examined the splintered rail where their clue had been found.

“See,” he explained while the others hung over the edge to look, “the cloth caught on the outside of this splinter, as though the man who wore it slid down the side, holding on to the rail with his hands before he jumped free.”

“Well, ghosts don’t wear thick blue woolen clothes,” said Ann. “We can be sure that real people have been here.”

“I call this a pretty promising find of Ben’s,” said Jo, as he led the way toward the open hatch. “It makes me feel very different about this boat.”

Sliding down the companion-ladder they landed in the tiny passage from which the captain’s cubbyhole and the mate’s opened on either side. The captain’s stateroom was slightly larger than the mate’s, and his berth ran under the open porthole in which70 the thick glass had been shattered. The berth was piled with moldering blankets; apparently no one had touched them since the wreck. Beside the berth, wedged between it and the wall, a table stood with its only drawer pulled open, showing that it was empty.

70

“The log should have been there,” explained Jo, “in that drawer. But it had been taken away before ever our men got to the wreck. And over here on this wall is the closet where the captain kept his clothes; they were hanging in it when we were here last.”

Ann unhinged the latch and swung the door open. Two suits hung from the hooks. She felt them to discover whether anything was in the pockets, and she found the cloth damp and sticky. The closet smelled of the sea.

There was a familiar feel to the cloth under her fingers. “I believe that this coat is made of the same cloth as the piece Ben found.”

Jo and Ben came quickly to her side. “The cloth of this suit is better quality,” pronounced Jo, “and the coat isn’t torn anywhere. Most deep-sea men wear clothes like that and so the torn piece doesn’t mean much except that the man who wore it is a sailor, most likely.”

Helen was very much interested in the little cubbyhole. “I should like this room for a doll house,” she said, and she stayed in it while the others went across the passage to the mate’s stateroom.

71 They found things there in the same 

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